Sexual Radicalism: Imperial Project, Global Goliath

While US conservatives are distracted by internal debates, the wealthy and powerful international movement for LGBT rights is aggressively targeting nations that are poorer and less powerful.

Speaking before the United Nations earlier this month—bragging about American leadership in a global movement to normalize homosexuality, same-sex marriage, artificial reproductive technology, and cross-dressing—John Kerry revealed the deep pockets and loaded guns that the world’s only superpower can count on to bring such ideas to nations that have religious or cultural objections:

The Global Equality Fund is one way in which like-minded countries can address this injustice and show their support for LGBT persons. Since the United States launched the Fund in 2011, it has allocated over $7 million in more than 50 countries worldwide. And the investments have helped to challenge the discriminatory laws that undermine human rights and bolster—and to bolster civil society organizations that defend those rights.

With support from a range of like-minded governments, including The Netherlands, Norway, France, Germany, Iceland, Finland, Denmark, and private sector partners as well, we are expanding the scope of the programs that this Fund supports. Earlier this month, President Obama and the Prime Minister of Sweden Fredrik Reinfeldt announced an additional $12 million for this effort. And today, I’m happy to announce another $1 million contribution from The Netherlands, and we’re grateful to you for that.

This is not like saving people from Nazi concentration camps. Kerry is confessing that he and other wealthy nations are earmarking money to fund cultural insurgencies in nations that are poorer and less powerful. In Latin America, for instance, American operatives receiving federal funding are being sent to train cells abroad to agitate against the host country’s laws.

In Africa, where postmodern gay families are still culturally nonsensical, and where the LGBT lobby can hardly be described as a priority, President Obama shamelessly tried to pressure Senegal and Kenya to redefine marriage, receiving a very cool response.

Are developing allies being lobbied or exploited?

In many cases, these less-wealthy nations, such as India, Ghana, and Mexico, are being asked simultaneously to abandon their religious or cultural views of family life and to provide surrogate mothers to the growing market of homosexual couples looking to acquire children.

In crude terms, male-male couples that want children are looking to control a dependent without having to support the child’s biological mother beyond birth.

As I have learned quite well, the word “slavery” is incendiary to homosexuals who feel they are simply trying to found loving families. Still, international gay surrogacy involves predominantly wealthy and white men from powerful countries buying babies from poor women of color and taking them away forever. If you buy a human being, what is this if not an echo of the world’s wretched history of human bondage?

Forcing other countries to redefine their heritage, legacy, familial support systems, religions, moralities, and role models, then implying to them that it is okay to sell their children to American homosexual couples in a brave new world is . . . well, not exactly what most rioters had in mind when they fought with police in front of the Stonewall Inn.

We have not done enough to warn people in vulnerable countries—not only in Latin America, but everywhere in the world—about a globalist ideology that is rising to immense power in the twenty-first century, based on breaking down mores and social relationships that evolved from reliable gender definitions. The LGBT lobby is encouraging homosexual men to take children away from mothers of the Third World, and then leaving the surrogate mothers to perish once the initial fee is paid.

The “Ism” that Dares Not Speak Its Name

The story of the contemporary LGBT movement is complicated, because people like to think about it as a moral debate, but it is actually the story of an “ism,” like communism or imperialism. Regardless of its righteous origins, it has become a system combining staunch and sometimes irrational dogma with a grid of wealth, propaganda, institutional power, and access to violent force. A report in September revealed that 6 percent of all philanthropic spending in the entire world was devoted to advancing the LGBT agenda.

It is useful to invoke Edward Said, a man hated by most conservatives, but someone who theorized the underlying dynamics of imperialism in language helpful in understanding the LGBT movement as a global “ism.” Below is a passage from my 2011 monograph, The Colorful Conservative, in which I summarize the most pertinent parts of Said’s landmark work, Orientalism:

Said’s project grew out of his own study of Michel Foucault’s models for power and language. Foucault made the link between language and political power irrefutable. Orientalism in turn suggested an ironclad link between literature and the logic of colonialism. Put simply, the stories we tell (i.e. literature) reaffirm what we think we know (i.e. “knowledge” as a construct). We base our political decisions on what we think we know; ergo, our literature not only reflects but habilitates unequal power relations between ourselves and people whose submission we desire.

The “discourse,” a term loaded with power by Michel Foucault’s theories, precedes, frames, and stages the gestures of power in real time, turning ideas into ideologies.

Radical Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar foresaw much of the LGBT movement’s trend toward becoming a global “ism” when she published, in 2007, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s theories, she accused LGBT activists of mirroring the imperialistic rhetoric of colonizers in their discussion of gay “rights” overseas, in places such as Iran.

Someone like Puar and I would usually have very little in common, but her anti-colonial critique somehow meets my objections, especially where it has implications for biopolitics and global inequality. LGBT people constitute at best 1 percent of the entire globe’s population. Their “rights” are largely non-essential things such as the sentimental need for acceptance, the joy of throwing a wedding banquet, the delight in showering with people of different genitalia, and the ambition of having children without having to share property with a partner of the opposite sex. Yet the campaign for such “rights” has received 6 percent of all generosity in the world, from a pool that also meets the needs of orphans, paupers, refugees, and victims of famine and natural disasters.

A Masterpiece in Battle Tactics

The proponents of the LGBT “ism,” which I will call ligbitism for lack of an existing word, were brilliant in keeping traditionalists in each country distracted with moral debates while they stampeded on to the next theater of ideological war.

Conservatives in nations like the USA, Canada, Argentina, and France, have until now fallen prey to the ligbitists’ shrewd operational tactics. While people in the United States—particularly the opponents of same-sex marriage—were entangled in relentless state-by-state battles with the LGBT lobby at home, the lobby made a global move through the Obama Administration’s State Department, which has utterly changed the global landscape.

It was the classic move that militaries call a “feint.” Here is how the Army’s Field Manual defines a feint (See FM 101-5-1, operational terms):

A type of attack used as a deception intended to draw the enemy's attention away from the area of the main attack. This induces the enemy to move his reserves or to shift his fire support in reaction to the feint. Feints must appear real and therefore require some contact with the enemy. Usually a limited-objective attack ranging in size from a raid to a supporting attack is conducted.

The LGBT lobby had each nation’s spokespeople locked in bitter struggles over the word “marriage” while they advanced quickly into the realm of procreation, opening up traffic lines for biomaterials and new markets for babies without being criticized for serious human rights abuses.

Consider what happened most recently with the debate about outcomes for children raised by same-sex couples. Certainly it is necessary to consider studies that counteract the faux "consensus" among same-sex marriage advocates that such children face no particular disadvantages.

But by agreeing to argue over whether kids raised by gays are “better” or “worse” than other kids, traditionalists made it possible for such kids to feel like they were being attacked for a household situation they didn’t choose. They also gave the LGBT lobby open court for a slam dunk. As long as the LGBT lobby could come up with studies and shining examples of Zach Wahls-like success stories, no matter how forced or un-generalizable, conservatives would seem disproved.

Alana Newman’s recent Public Discourse article drawing attention to the international dimension of these procreative and guardianship practices is excellent—but one has to regret the fact that there was not enough vigilance about what the ligbitists were doing in embassies, airports, and United Nations meeting rooms for years, securing visas and conspiring with partners across national lines to make sure their ideology would blossom into a force on a par with world-historical movements such as mercantilism.

Michel Foucault would be proud—not only of the ligbitists, but of the underground that is now blooming to stop them. Foucault made it clear that whatever tactics someone can use to exert power can also be turned against them. So it goes in France, where I had the honor of speaking before the “Summer University” of the Manif pour Tous. In England, France, and Belgium, where I traveled this year in search of allies, a transnational underground is forming.

When I stated, during my brief speech, that the LGBT lobby had inordinate influence over John Kerry’s State Department, a roar of boos swept through the room. Europeans, even those who are comfortable with same-sex marriage, tend to see the larger ligbitist agenda, especially redefining families, as a “made in USA” export. That will be the subject of my next article for Public Discourse.